It’s been a good year for the political press at Brown. Both the print magazine Brown Political Review
and the online publication “Brown Politics Memo” released their first
issues during the fall semester. Politics, says Benjamin Wofford ’15,
coeditor of the Brown Political Review, “is the last, best, only hope. I view the circus-ness and absurdity of it as evidence that it’s real.”

Frank Mullin

Haakim
Nainar '14 and Benjamin Wofford '15, cofounders of the Brown Political
Review, are creating a forum for nonpartisan political discussion.

Wofford transferred to Brown in his sophomore year and immediately
noticed the lack of a student-run journal of politics. Having worked on
one at Penn, his previous school, he was shocked that Brown was the
only Ivy university without one.

The Review is the result of nine months of planning by
Wofford, coeditor Haakim Nainar ’14, and three other founders:
Alexandros Diplas, Todd Harris, and Oliver Hudson, all class of ’14. It
runs to around thirty pages and will appear twice a semester. Funding
is from the Political Theory Project.

The magazine’s first issue featured interviews with Washington Post
blogger Ezra Klein, the powerful conservative Grover Norquist, and
former presidential candidate Howard Dean. The student-written pieces
include analyses of sectarian divisions in Lebanon, the effectiveness
of foreign aid, and the future of the Republican Party. Nainar says the
aim is to be nonpartisan. “Brown students like to break with binary
thinking,” he says. “You’ll read pieces where you’ll wonder, ‘Where
does this fit on the political spectrum?’”

Politics runs in Wofford’s family. His great-grandfather, Harris
Llewellyn Wofford, served as a senator from Pennsylvania in the early
1990s, and in 2002 Benjamin’s father, Dan Wofford, narrowly lost an
election to represent southeastern Pennsylvania in the U.S. Congress.
Wofford helped out on his father’s campaign and has worked on several
others since. “Politics is my passion,” he says.

“Brown Politics Memo” is more of a political blog than a polished
magazine. It also maintains a Twitter feed and aims to be nonpartisan.
The “Memo” has chosen not to accept any funding from the Undergraduate
Council of Students or from Brown in general so it can maintain
journalistic independence.

“It’s all sort of happening at once,” says the Brown Political Review’s
Wofford. “Who knows? Ten to fifteen years from now, people might look
back on it as some sort of political renaissance.”

Read the “Brown Politics Memo” at www.brownpoliticsmemo.com and follow its Twitter feed @BPoliticsmemo. Read the Brown Political Review online at www.brownpoliticalreview.org and follow its Twitter feed @BrownBPR.

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